As part of our goal of fostering discusssion among mHealth researchers, the mHealthHUB and MD2K have created a page for those interested in discussing or asking questions about MD2K software and also mHealth topics in general. Discuss@MD2K presently has categories for questions relating to the MD2K software (mCerebrum, Cerebral Cortex). The site allows users to sign in using their Facebook, Google or Github logins.

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To that end, we want to hear from you! Please let us know about upcoming events, research of interest to the mHealth community, job opportunities, or any other mHealth news.

We are especially interested in hearing from mHealth students and professionals interested in contributing content to mHealthHUB.

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An article published February 8 in the Journal of Medical Internet Research discusses the Connected and Open Research Ethics (CORE) initiative, a tool for researchers and Institutional Review Boards to help them share resources.

CORE, housed at the University of California-San Diego, is working to develop dynamic and relevant ethical practices to guide mHealth and digital medicine research. The paper, co-authored by John Torous, M.D., of Harvard Medical School and Camille Nebeker, M.S., Ed.D. of the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health, Division of Behavioral Medicine at UCSD, encourages readers to join the CORE Network in order to contribute to the "bigger conversation" on ethics in the digital age.

Dr. Nebeker gave a recent webinar on Research Ethics in the Digital Age as part of the MD2K Center's webinar series.

A call for papers has been announced for the first Workshop on Digital Biomarkers, which will be co-located with MobiSys 2017. The workshop offers a unified forum designed to bring academics, industry researchers and medical practitioners together. The organizers seek novel, innovative and exciting submissions that are broadly related to the modeling, testing, and validation of new digital biomarkers for predicting incidence of diseases, health conditions, effects of treatments, and interventions.

The workshop aims to facilitate a systematic discussion among experts from different knowledge domains including mobile sensing, systems, machine learning, medicine and health sciences in order to:

Identify the key shortcomings of the existing mobile and wearable sensor systems, and research study software platforms (e.g., ResearchKit and ResearchStack) for digital biomarker inference in terms of scalability, customizability, and sensing affordances

North Carolina A & T State University is looking for a post-doctoral research associate in Human Factors/Cyber-Human Analytics. The position will work with graduate students and undergraduate students to conduct research in the Human Factors Analytics Laboratory and the Cyber-Human Analytics Research for the Internet of Things (CHARIOT) Laboratory. The research focuses on smart and connected health, with an emphasis on caregivers of persons with dementia. The position requires strong capabilities in synthesis and creativity to support innovation, and awareness of inclusive research practices with equitable social impacts. The postdoctoral researcher will work with multidisciplinary teams of faculty and students consisting of engineers, psychologists, medical clinicians, and artists.

The second Women in Data Science (WiDS) Conference is scheduled to be held Feb. 3 at Stanford University is sold out, but there are several regional events being held and thje conference will be live-streamed.

According to its website, the conference "aims to inspire and educate data scientists, regardless of gender, and support women in the field. It is a one-day technical conference that will feature the latest research in a number of domains as well as provide information on how companies are using data science to their advantage.

In addition to the Stanford conference, WiDS events are being held at 46 other locations. A list can be found here. It will also be broadcast live.

Applications are now being accepted for the 2017 mHealth Training Institute (mHTI), which will be held August 6-11, 2017 at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The application deadline is January 29. A total of 35 scholars will be selected to attend the institute.

The goal of the NIH-funded mHTI is to develop the next generation of academic mHealth researchers. The unique transdisciplinary incubator brings together researchers from disparate backgrounds for a week-long, immersive “bootcamp” in all things related to mHealth. In addition to providing the participants with a core educational grounding in transdisciplinary perspectives and methodologies essential to mHealth innovation, the mHTI seeks to instill in participants the intrapersonal and interpersonal skills and connections necessary for cross-cutting research.

The day-long 2016 BD2K Open Data Science Symposium: How Open Data and Open Science are Transforming Biomedical Research, will be held Dec. 1 in Bethesda, MD and webcast by the National Institutes of Health.

The symposium, which will run 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. ET, will feature discussions with the leaders in big data, open science and biomedical research. It will also showcase the finalists of the Open Data Science Prize, an international competition that sought prototypes on how to best unlneash the power of open content and data to advance biomedical research and its application for health benefit.

Santosh Kumar, director of the MD2K Center of Excellence, will present a seminar on "Biobank for mHealth: Collecting High-frequency Mobile Sensor Data for Long-lasting Research Utility" as part of a Director's Seminar series sponsored by the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research at the National Institutes of Health.

The seminar will be at 1 p.m. CT on November 15.

Dr. Kumar's talk will discuss the adopting an approach to collecting digital mobile sensor data in a way that allows it to be reprocessed for future research use, much in the same way biomedical studies archive specimens in biobanks for future use. The talk will also discuss current MD2K research and the software to support mHealth research studies.

A webcast on "Metabolomics and Proteomics Biomarkers Discovery and Validation in Toxicity Studies" will be presented by Richard Beger, M.S., Ph.D., Research Chemist with the FDA's National Center for Toxicological Research.

About the Presentation Metabolomics and proteomics technologies are being used in nonclinical and clinical studies to discover translational biomarkers in biofluids that would enable us to diagnose toxicity and predict toxicity before it occurs. This presentation will discuss the discovery of metabolomics and proteomics biomarkers following administration of acetaminophen in mice, rats, and children. Another study will explore biomarkers of doxorubicin cardiotoxicity.

As part of our goal of fostering discusssion among mHealth researchers, the mHealthHUB and MD2K have created a page for those interested in discussing or asking questions about MD2K software and also mHealth topics in general. Discuss@MD2K presently has categories for questions relating to the MD2K software (mCerebrum, Cerebral Cortex). The site allows users to sign in using their Facebook, Google or Github logins.

Once a user links or creates an account and sign in, he or she can comment on existing topics or create new ones. Questions regarding MD2K software will be responded to as soon as practical by a member of the MD2K staff. We do ask that, before commenting or creating topics, you read the Terms of Service, FAQ/Guidelines, and Privacy Policy.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is accepting applications for its Science and Technology Policy Fellowship (STPF). The application deadline is Nov. 1. The fellowships provide outstanding scientists and engineers the opportunity to learn first-hand about policy-making and to contribute their knowledge and analytical skills to the federal policy-making process. Fellows serve a one-year assignment in a branch of the federal government and receive a stipend along with other support, including reimbursement for health insurance.

Those who are interested can participate in an online chat with current AAAS S&T fellows to learn about the fellowship at 2 p.m. on Oct. 11. Go here to register for the chat. To apply, go here.

The Food and Drug Administration has announced a competition to develop an app that connects opioid users who are overdosing with people nearby that have naloxone, a medication that reverses the effects of an overdose.

The 2016 FDA Naloxone App Competition offers a $40,000 prize. The goal is to spur the development of "a low-cost, scalable, crowd-sourced mobile phone application that helps increase the likelihood that opioid users, their immediate personal networks, and first respondsers are able to identify and react to an overdose by administering naloxone," according to the FDA announcement.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 2 million Americans aged 12 or older either abused or were dependent on opioid pain killers in 2014. Also in 2014, 61 percent of drug overdose deaths involved either an opioid painkiller or heroin, and between 2013 and 2014, deaths from any opioid increased 14 percent.

A team of researchers from four universities - UCLA, UC San Francisco, University of Memphis and University of Pennsylvania - have been awarded a new data cyberinfrastructure grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The team will develop a new cyberinfrastructure called mProv to annotate high-frequency mobile sensor data with data source, quality, validity, and semantics to facilitate sharing of such data with the wider research community.

The project, mProv: Provenance-based Data Analytics Cyberinfrastructure for High-frequency Mobile Sensor Data, will be led by Dr. Santosh Kumar, a professor and Moss Chair of Excellence in Computer Science. Dr. Zachary Ives, another computer scientist, will lead the University of Pennsylvania team, Dr.Ida Sim, a professor of Medicine and medical informaticist, will lead the UCSF site, and Dr. Mani Srivastava, an electrical engineer and computer scientist, will lead the UCLA team. Other collaborators on the project include Open mHealth, Open Humans, and Quantified Self.

The Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Initiative will be presenting a seminar series, "The BD2K Guide to the Fundamentals of Data Science," at 9-10 a.m. PT every Friday beginning September 9. The virtual lecture series will focus ont he data science underlying modern biomedical research.

The seminar series is being jointly produced by the BD2K Centers-Coordination Center, the NIH Office of Data Science and the BD2K Training Coordinating Center. The regularly scheduled weekly webinar presentations will cover the basics of data management, representation, computation, statistical inference, data modeling and other topics relevant to "big data" biomedicine.

The Wireless Health Technical Program Committee has invited authors to submit late-breaking research for consideration as a demo or poster presentation at the 2016 annual scientific meeting, scheduled for October 25-27, 2016 at the National Institutes of Health Conference Center.

In making the call, the committee is recognizing that "the most exciting and rapidly advancing investigations may include results that were not available at the time of the abstract submission deadline." However, this category is not intended to offer a second deadline for regular abstract submissions.

The deadline to apply for the award is August 8. Those receiving the award will be required to present a 2-minute, 2-slide flash talk at the National Science Fooundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program Info Session at 11 a.m . August. 19.

To be eligible, an applicant must be a current junior/senior undergraduate, a graduate students, or a young professionals who received their Ph.D. after Jan. 1st, 2015. Women and minority applicants are strongly encouraged.

mHealthHUB is a service of the Center of Excellence for Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge (MD2K). MD2K , headquartered at the University of Memphis, is supported by the National Institutes of Health Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Initiative Grant #1U54EB020404